Richard Wright's self -inscription in “Native Son”: How Richard was born

Philip A Douglas, Purdue University

Abstract

My dissertation project, ultimately, is to relocate Wright's seminal novel within a context of the author's own struggle for personal catharsis, a catharsis that involved what he perceived as an assertion of the reality of his subjectivity. The denial of one's subjectivity by others, Wright implies, is humanly universal, almost a condition of existence. To acknowledge someone as a “Thou” rather than an “It,” to use the language of philosopher Martin Buber, is to be engaged with that person's feelings, that person's suffering. Most of us try to avoid such direct empathy, if for no other reason than to keep ourselves sane. Under such conditions, racism emerges as a social mechanism, a particularly harmful one, designed to buttress such evasion. Thus, while race plays a key part in Wright's life struggle, and certainly in that of the protagonist of Native Son, Wright concludes that racism is a manifestation of an innate psychological, even spiritual dissonance that plagues us all. The problem for Wright, the same problem we all share, is to attempt to overcome this dissonance, to overcome this gap. I contend that much can be made of Wright's lecture, “How Bigger was Born,” as it stands as a confession of what action he intended his central character to perform for him. Bigger becomes a deputy who enacts physical and linguistic violence upon his world, and in so doing allows Wright to enact figurative violence, in the coin of narrative and language, upon his world. My concern is how Richard Wright inscribes himself into his texts, and through his texts, into the world. Such inscription allows, even forces readers to recognize and honor his subjectivity. In this practice of inscription Wright is not necessarily interested in autobiographical or quasi-biographical representations of himself in his fiction since he achieved that with Black Boy. What he does in his fiction, and even in some of his non-fiction, is to work through a representation of himself that other people have of him. Native Son is the first and primary example of this “self-inscription.”

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Morris, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature|African Americans

COinS